Warren talks blueprint to fight HIV/AIDS

LAKE FOREST For the first time in a decade, Kay Warren – who has led Saddleback Church's fight to help the victims of HIV/AIDS – says officials at the forefront are talking about the beginning of the end of the disease.

On Thursday, Warren, who founded the church's HIV& AIDS Initiative, attended a commemoration for World AIDS Day at the State Department in Washington, D.C., where Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton shared the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief blueprint for the next four years. The blueprint was developed by President George W. Bush in 2003.

Warren said Clinton was the first official to talk about “the beginning of the end of AIDS.” Among the priorities endorsed by the blueprint were reducing mother-to-child transmissions of HIV, increasing male circumcision for HIV prevention, and increasing access to condoms, HIV testing and counseling.

For her part, Warren, wife of Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren, is challenging church members this weekend to adopt an approach consistent with the United Nation's three-year strategy of “getting to zero” with AIDS. The goals: zero babies born with HIV, zero AIDS-related deaths, zero new HIV infections, and zero stigma and discrimination.

Over the past few years, more people infected with HIV are living with the disease because of the progress in medications, Warren said.

“The idea is to get people to take their drugs and get them to undetectable status,” Warren said. “With that, they would have very little to transmit. This keeps them healthier and will not decimate their immune system. We know now we can get people to this point.”

On Wednesday, Saddleback Church college pastor Brad Baker coordinated an outreach ministry at Saddleback College and Irvine Valley College. Students from the ministry set up 30 Adirondack chairs at the campuses to symbolize the 30 million people who have died from AIDS. Fifteen smaller chairs were set up to represent the 15 million children orphaned in Africa due to AIDS. The display moved to the church's Lake Forest campus this weekend.

Warren was instrumental in presenting Saddleback Church's first HIV& AIDS conference in 2005. She also launched the HIV& AIDS Initiative, which equips pastors and church leaders to begin or strengthen existing HIV and AIDS ministries and encourages those living with HIV or AIDS from a spiritual point of view. The church has since founded the Saddleback Orphan Care ministry

“It's a race; we need to prevent new infections,” Warren said. “We've got to stop people becoming HIV-infected in the first place.”

Warren has set another goal: She wants Saddleback Church to reduce the number of orphans in Rwanda to zero by 2015. HIV creates orphans, and being an orphan makes a child more vulnerable to HIV, she said.

Warren is speaking about her passion to stop the disease at church services this weekend.

The services also include Cynthia Styffe, 13, who was an orphan from Rwanda. Four years ago, Styffe was adopted by a Saddleback family. Along with her brother and younger sister, she has a new family. Timothy Brown, the first person cured of HIV, and a once-discordant couple who decided to not let the strain of an HIV diagnosis tear their family apart also will take part.

“AIDS is still an emergency,” Warren said. “It hasn't gone away. People are still dying. Children are still orphaned. The stigma is still there.”

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